Monday, February 27, 2017

The Outrage Will Not Be Televised!

When six Muslims
were killed in Canada Donald Trump gave us silence. Last week,
when a legal immigrant from India was killed in Kansas we got the
same. Our president and his administration seems to be more comfortable talking about the
fictional terrorist attacks that occurred in Atlanta, Bowling Green, and Sweden
than it is addressing the renaissance of white nationalism. I hope people of
color and religious minorities are taking these slights seriously. This
administration's silence about white supremacist attacks on racial and religious minorities,
their houses of worship, and their burial sites says more about their concern for you than the
lawyerly crafted statements about bigotry they've
been guilted into reading days and sometimes weeks later. Don't get it twisted:
you were not a key component of their electoral victory and your otherness
isn't endearing to them or their conception of what it means to be an
American. In other words: you are collateral damage in the fight to "Make
America Great Again".

President #TwitterFingers never
misses an opportunity to tweet about the media, or call for boycotts
against companies he doesn't like, yet he struggles to get his tweets off when
it comes to attacks perpetrated by the white
supremacists who've aligned themselves with his brand of nationalist
populism. His silence is compounded by the silence of his supporters.
I’ve been impressed by the lengths some #Trumpstans are willing to go to disconnect the
actions of white supremacists from the rhetoric espoused by the president.

Hate crimes committed against
Muslims are up 67% in the last few years. Srinivas Kuchibhotla (a man of Indian descent)
was killed because xenophobia, bigotry, and hatred have become
a (re)normalized part of American life. Sikhs, Hindus and other
racial minorities have been the victims of bigoted attacks by people too
ignorant to understand who they were supposed to be hating. This could become the new
normal. I have friends of Puerto Rican heritage who've
been mocked with chants of build that wall. The
Trump administration may not be directly responsible for the actions of
their supporters, but they put the battery in their backs. At rallies, Trump plays
to the fear and hatred of some of his supporters and when something bad happens he denies any
culpability. This is a dangerous game. I would rather have a treacherous
enemy than a weak-willed ally.

I've read social media posts from people who live in the Blue Ridge Mountains (isolated from racial and religious diversity) that echo the calls for a soft nationalism as advocated by the Alt-right/white supremacist wing of their party. These aren’t inherently bad people; some of them are angry and others are afraid, but all are being misled for the sake of ratings. Many
of them don't know the difference between a Sunni Muslim and a Sikh, but they see
them both as potential members of Isis. Fox news and conservative talk radio
has disseminated so much blatant xenophobia for so long that many of their
supporters have tacitly accepted the fact that all brown people want to kill
them. When "real" Americans or people of European descent are the
victims of terrorism the presses stop and there’s wall to wall coverage, but
when black and brown people are the victims of American terrorism there's a
noticeable difference in the level of outrage. Here I was thinking #AllLivesMatter.
Sadly, there will be more blood spilled by those who equate “Making America Great
Again” to making it less colorful. There are people who are questioning what place, if any, they have in
America.